CURTAINS – on curation

This text pulls back the curatorial choices of this piece called thecarrierbag festival, making visible how decisions always shape artistic endeavours. The text is neither the piece itself nor the heavy cloth of drapes hanging in front of the stage. It’s your eyes sliding over sentences, the words making visible, your gaze pulling the drapes to reveal the curatorial choices on display in the stage lights.

It’s 2015 — and in between the two cities, we, Emilia and Karis, found ourselves tapping out long emails to each other. We were in between a forming friendship, a collegial correspondence, a co-writing session, and a stretched out conversation about how to organise ourselves around dance. In these emails we wrapped our thoughts around each other’s thoughts, disrupted sentences with sentences and carried each other’s words with new words. This is where thecarrierbag festival started.

It’s 2023 — and in the same city we, the curators, want to meet the festival anew. For this year’s edition, we tend to thecarrierbag festival as if it were a piece in itself. We do this to remind ourselves that the choices we make, like when making a piece, are not neutral but do something. Choices — organisational, curatorial, artistic — are decisions that are situated, that shape and give form. We are affected through our bodies, our bodies are oriented towards objects, certain objects are within our reach, our reach is shaping our dreams, our dreams are the immaterial matter of our pieces. In order to unfold the idea of the festival as a piece, we have worked with a dramaturg and a scenographer, borrowing structures and roles from the logic of performance making. Storm Møller Madsen’s dramaturgical reflections have helped us situate our knowledge, turn towards our oversights, stretch our ways of thinking, and encounter our 8 year old work afresh. Anna Moderato’s scenography is a visual and tactile contemplation on concepts at the heart of the festival – a sculptural set design for the periphery, for that which happens off stage and in between acts.

We work with the idea of curation as selection and curation as situation. Curation as selection is about recognising that curation is a process of choosing, always by a not-neutral someone.

We selected performances that do something to our bodies, they move something in us. All of the performances sparked affective responses — from small itches of feelings to large crushing states. Lisen Ellard’s Dirgy Dancing presses gently on our hearts, rests in our throats, and leaves us with dances and loss. Jules Fischer and Josefine Opsahl’s It Doesn’t Look Like Anything To Me hits us with a raw softness, an overexposed intimacy and a saturated tenderness. Angela Goh’s Pattern Recognition feels full of muted contrasts between the crisp and the sticky, the composed and the erratic. Finally Lusia Fernanda Alfonso’s Masterpiece teases us with its loading, thrilling and melodramatic nature. Curious about why these affects do what they do, we followed and traced them like a map, connecting feelings with positionality.

Curaton as situation is about seeing curation as something that forges an encounter, shapes moods, builds scenarios and invites for ways of being together. The programme is made up of performances and interventions, and these interventions are expressions of curation as situation. They are small performative actions or moments that blow life into the space in between the performances. They are crooked welcoming speeches, damp dancing, and tasty food.

It’s now — and the stage has been staged in the middle of the space, like a prop in a scene in a piece called a festival. The performances are placed on this stage in the middle of the big, bright and breezy space in the even bigger, brighter and breezier midsummer nights. The big theatrical island in the centre trembles with impressions. The audience sit on all four sides. Literally gathering around the performances. Later, outside, the audience will sit around the bonfire. They will rest their backs against the scenography of the festival, where conversations will begin and narratives will be acted out. The June night sky, the vast background to this scene, is full of diagonal crossings that mix up the mood. This is a grandiose setting for a homey piece to unfold.

We invite you into the curatorial choices, the curtains in front of the scenes, the pieces, the in-betweens, the montages, the interventions, the climaxes, the speeches, the flat notes, the longings, the laughings, the lingerings, the light-settings, the low intensities, the last drinks, the next day, the fictions, the feelings, the chapters, the beginnings, the sittings, the dancing, the given and the givings. All of the scenes that the piece thecarrierbag festival holds, inside the big, breezy container of Fabrikken for Kunst og Design, inside the home, at the theatre, underneath the bright June sky that stretches into the horizon.

Welcome!

Written by Emilia Gasiorek and Karis Zidore, curators and artistic leaders of thecarrierbag festival